fun fest or nightmare

I have always been fascinated with anti-utopian literature and cinema—from Orwell to Huxley.  I like to trace where reality ends and the surreal takes flight.  The underlying message of so many anti-utopian books and films is precisely that a utopia cannot and does not exist.  Not even when you are drugging members of society with soma or feeding them the illusion of a “still life with children” or turning death and funeral homes into “fun hom[e]s” (13).  Something, that one percent of the Pleasantville ideal that goes awry, contaminates the picture perfect illusion, saturating it with the cold, painful, colorful reality of imperfection.  Perhaps we learn from dreaming up utopias because it helps us make sense of the “absurdities” of life and family:  “My parents are most real to me in fictional terms” (Ch. 3). 

The lines between illusion and reality are blurred--sometimes almost invisible:

The illusion.
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The reality. Psychological abuse.
http://adrianasassoon.files.wordpress.com/
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And for that matter, suicide reflects so many of these connundrums and ironies of life—of the fiction and the reality—exemplified perfectly in the following statement: “the subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.” (47)  Suicide.  Is a solution—to the absurd.  Fun Home to me is not so much a story of an dysfunctional family, so much as it is a story of the normal state of families today.  Suicide rates and divorce rates reflect this phenomenon of the family as being at the heart of many psychological problems.  I mean, therapists are always asking you to go back to your childhood—what was your relationship with your mother, your father, their marriage, your family, and so forth.  It freaks me out to the point of never wanting to have kids for fear I, an already queer type, would screw them up.

What depressed me was reading that sometimes things were really good—almost as extreme as the bad times.  One moment the father would be singing lullabies, then next he would be spanking his kids and torturing them with verbal abuse.

Like in Fun Home, the story “could have been a romantic story, like in it’s a wonderful life, when jimmy stewart and donna reed fix up that old house and raise their family there” (10).  But we all know perfect families don’t exist.  Romantic stories may, but mostly, in dreams and illusions.  To me, the irony of wanting something fake, something “ornamental,” in a world of imperfections and injustices is just biting.  For one, even remembering her father, the protagonist says she cannot bring herself to hate him: “I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers” (22).  Why is the bar lower for fathers than for mothers?  Why did she remember so much about her father and her mother was as much like a backdrop to her memories as were the ornaments on the walls.

Emotionally Numb. Barbed wire guards
vulnerable memories and emotions.
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Pardon the disorganized streams of consciousness; this book makes me think about so many vastly different things all at once.  Anyway, I was struck by the impact of her childhood on her emotional capacity later on after being exposed to a dissected cadaver and compounded by the absurdity in her father's death.  She says:  "I have made use of the former technique myself, however, this attempt to access emotion vicariously." (ch.2).  So what happens to a kiddo whose childhood was riddled with ironies, illusions, dysfunctions, psychological abuse?  She shuts down, becomes numbed.  It is easier to survive with an iced heart than to feel the overwhelming sensations that accompany painful and odd childhood.  My question is, how do you break down the walls once they've been built?  This is perhaps what we've been doing all year: trying to feel--empathize, sympathize, emote.....love (oneself or everyone or both).